Downtown Streets Team

They help fight homelessness by providing housing and job opportunities to their clients. Downtown Streets Team is ending homelessness by restoring the dignity and rebuilding the lives of unhoused men and women. Serving the community through work teams prepares members for permanent employment and housing.

Our Big Wins in 2015

A New Responsive Theme – Downtown Streets Team got a brand new theme for their wordpress site & also a custom made platform to manage volunteering online.

Social Media Campaigns – We helped Downtown Streets Team create five social media campaigns consisting of a custom graphic, a video, tweets and Facebook posts.

Printed Collateral – The print team worked like crazy to meet our deadlines and went above and beyond delivering some awesome pieces of print collateral.

I for one am so proud of the work we created between the Zurbians and Downtown Streets Team and excited to put it to good use. Their expertise in design and the many different technologies required to give us a complete facelift, not to mention their dedication, made the 24 hours a huge success. Most of all, they were a blast to work with and our staff had some great bonding time.

Chris Richardson - Regional Director at Downtown Streets Team

8:00am

This Morning's Forecast: Brainstorms

As Bryan’s written about on the blog, getting started with a volume of ideas and then filtering down can really help build momentum. It’s critical in a project like this to get that momentum going early and carry it out through the day.

Status Report!

We’re now six hours into our 24-hour race to help Downtown Streets Team create an amazing marketing campaign. Let’s check-in with each of the teams to see where they are.

Checking in with Downtown Streets Team

Although ZURB Wired has a pace all its own, moving at extreme speed is pretty normal for us ZURBians. As we enter the phase of Wired, working through visuals, content direction, and more, we wanted to check in with Downtown Streets Team to get a feel for what they thought of the work so far.

Reaching People with a Clear Message

ZURB’s design process begins with defining the problem and understanding organizational needs. This includes aspects such as the organization’s business needs, mission, culture, and target clients. Through defining the challenge, insights arise.

The Website Takes Shape!

In a previous post, we checked out how the visuals were evolving for print. Since then, the web team has continued this exploration few visuals of their own. In this clip, we share a few different visual treatments with the group to narrow down the website’s look and feel. Check it out:

We Made Our Print Deadline!

There was definitely some nail biting, but we made our print deadline! The trifold brochure, mailer and small flyer have all been sent out to the team at Big Ink Printing and will be ready in just a few hours. They also finished up a gorgeous color poster to be printed by our good friends over at Zazzle.

Letting Off Steam In the Wee Hours

It’s either really late or really early here at Wired and apparently that means it’s photobooth time! It’s a magical time of night where uncontrollable goofiness due to lack of sleep meets props, a camera, and of course Flickr.

Meet the ZURBians!

Up until this point, we’ve talked about our Progressive Design process and shown our work in various stages of completion, but we’d like to take a moment and shine the light on the men and women that make up the ZURB team. Without futher ado, meet the ZURBians:

Grueling; Grateful; Honored

Grueling, grateful and honored are descriptors that don’t often appear together. When they are spoken together, the context is usually at the end of an epic experience. These were some of the phrases that the Downtown Streets Team gave to the camera after nearly 23 hours of ZURB Wired.

Revealing Downtown Streets Team’s Print Collateral

Believe it or not, within the 24 hours of Wired, Downtown Streets Team and ZURB worked together to produce a new campaign and translated that campaign into a website experience as well as print collateral. In the video below, you’ll catch a glimpse of the shiny new collateral. To see how the team came to the designs, check out the Notable set.

ZURB 2015 is a Success!

And just like that ZURB Wired 2015 draws to a close. We set some ambitious goals, and we’re happy to say not only did we accomplish them, but had time to even crank out some additional pieces. Let’s a take look back at everything we were able to accomplish.

8:00am

What We Accomplished in 24 hours

Brand new branding and illustrations to match

A thank you mailer

An 11 x 17 poster

A trifold brochure

A flyer

A bus ad

A sandwich sign

An employment brochure

A comprehensive content overhaul

A new custom WordPress theme

A volunteer management platform

An email newsletter template

Five targeted social campaigns consisting of a video, five graphics, 5 tweets and 5 Facebook posts

Landing page and email copy

It was fantastic to work with such a passionate team and for such a worthy cause. The Downtown Streets Team were really engaged throughout the whole 24-hrs and knowing how important this is to them kept us all going strong to the finish.

John Leenane – Partner at ZURB

Ending Homelessness Through the Dignity of Work

We began our eighth ZURB Wired by breaking both teams up into small groups to come up with a volume of ideas. After narrowing down a visual direction, print materials and later a website were created. Working 24 straight hours, we created a brand new responsive website, posters, brochures, postcards, flyers and even bus ads to help give Downtown Streets Team enough marketing materials to last for months.

Downtown Streets Team is celebrating 10 years of helping the homeless transform their lives through their unique work and community beautification programs, in addition to providing assistance with housing, medical care and education.

We guided Downtown Streets Team through the same design process and methods we use in our Studios work. Our goal with Wired: to help nonprofits, such as Downtown Streets Team, learn how to do more with less and mobilize in shorter bursts. When you work in smaller teams and in short bursts, you can accomplish amazing things!